“How sad it were to live And sit once more within the lonely hall, And miss the wonted number of my knights, * * * * * And in thy bowers of Camelot or of Usk Thy shadow still would glide from room to room, And I should evermore be vexed with thee In hanging robe or vacant ornament Or ghostly footfall echoing on the stair.”
This was when the time was come that Arthur should see Camelot no more--when he had gone forth to his last fight, and Guinevere had taken the nun’s habit and immured herself in Almesbury.
Renan has very finely remarked that in Celtic literature woman is more tenderly and delicately portrayed than in the writings and songs of any other race. Love is “a mystery, a kind of intoxication, a madness, a giddiness,” and woman is superbly idealised until she seems in our eyes an ethereal, radiant, half-spiritual or even angelic creature. The romances are “dewy with feminine sentiment,” and the chivalric conception of the heroine is so pure and beautiful that Percivale’s sister, or Geraint’s wife, appears “as a sort of vague vision intermediate between man and the supernatural world.” Even faithless Guinevere--is she not so rarely beautiful, are not her spell and witchery so strong, that, while hating her sin, we hesitate to join in her condemnation, and have no heart to approve such passionate denunciation as was spoken by the king in his hour of gloom?[27] The vision of Guinevere flashes upon us as she was when Lancelot led her from Cameliard to the king’s court at Camelot, when she went a-Maying with her maidens, and when she was the cynosure of all eyes among the spectators of the tournament. There was something daring on the part of the old chroniclers in making King Arthur’s danger issue from the best of knights and the most lovely of women--the two nearest to him, and bound to him by the most sacred ties of love and honour. Still more strange is it that, deep as their sinning was, we have so little blame--or rather, let us say, resentment--for Lancelot and Guinevere. This is not because Arthur has not the strongest claim upon our sympathy, or because for one moment he fails to win our admiration; it is only because Lancelot and Guinevere also have strong human claims upon us, and so far have won our regard that we cannot withhold our compassion also. Were not the knights themselves reluctant to condemn? The romance brings out the fact conspicuously that it was not the noblest, but the meanest, of the knights who revealed the wrong to the king; nor was it the gallant men who willed that Guinevere should die at the stake for her infidelity. And in the end do we not pity mournful and repentant Lancelot in his lonely castle, or when paying that noblest of tributes to his dead master? And does not even a deeper feeling extend to the desolate woman who wore out her life in the Almesbury convent?